The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's Part 10

Or, finally, take a little bit of Chaucer's deep, keen slyness, when he is speaking smilingly about himself and his own poetry. He has represented himself as standing in the House or Temple of Fame, observing company after company going up to the G.o.ddess, and pet.i.tioning for renown in the world for what they have done. Some she grants what they ask, others she dismisses crestfallen, and Chaucer thinks the _leve_ over:--

With that I gan about to wend, For one that stood right at my back Methought full goodly to me spak, And said, "Friend, what is thy name?

Art _thou_ come hither to have fame?"

"Nay, forsooth, friend," quoth I; "I came not hither, grammercy, For no such caus, by my head.

Sufficeth me, as I were dead, That no wight have _my_ name in hand: I wot myself best how I stand; For what I dree or what I think I will myself all it drink, Certain for the mor part, As farforth as I ken mine art!"

Chaucer ranks to this day as one of the very greatest and finest minds in the entire literature of the English speech, and stands therefore on a level far higher than can be a.s.sumed for his contemporary Barbour. But Barbour was a most creditable old worthy too. Let us have a sc.r.a.p or two from his _Bruce_. Who does not know the famous pa.s.sage which is the very key-note of that poem? One is never tired of quoting it:--

Ah! freedom is a n.o.ble thing; Freedom makes man to have liking: Freedom all solace to man gives; He lives at ease that freely lives.

A n.o.ble heart may have nane ease, Ne ellys nought that may him please Gif freedom faileth; for free liking Is yearnit ower all other thing; Nor he that aye has livit free May not know weel the propertie, The anger, ne the wretched doom, That is couplit to foul thirldom; But, gif he had essayit it, Then all perqure he suld it wit, And suld think freedom mair to prize Than all the gold in the warld that is.

Or take the portrait of the good Sir James, called "The Black Douglas,"

the chief companion and adherent of Bruce, introduced near the beginning of the poem, where he is described as a young man living moodily at St.

Andrews before the Bruce revolt:--

Ane weel great while there dwellit he: All men loved him for his bountie; For he was of full fair effere, Wise, courteous, and debonair; Large and lovand also was he, And ower all thing loved loyauty.

Loyautie to love is gretumly; Through loyautie men lives richtwisely; With a virtue of loyautie Ane man may yet sufficiand be; And, but loyautie, may nane have prize, Whether he be wicht or be he wise; For, where _it_ failis, nae virtue May be of prize, ne of value To mak ane man sae good that he May simply callit good man be.

He was in all his deeds leal; For him dedeignit not to deal With treachery ne with falst.

His heart on high honur was set, And him contened in sic manre That all him loved that war him near.

But he was not sae fair that we Suld speak greatly of his beaute.

In visage was he somedeal grey, And had black hair, as I heard say; But of his limbs he was well made, With bans great and shoulders braid; His body was well made leanlie, As they that saw him said to me.

When he was blythe, he was lovely And meek and sweet in company; But wha in battle micht him see All other countenance had he.

And in speech lispit he somedeal; But that set him richt wonder weel.

To Good Hector of Troy micht he In mony things likenit be.

Hector had black hair as he had, And stark limbs and richt weel made, And lispit also as did he, And was fulfillit of loyautie, And was courteous, and wise, and wicht.

My purpose in quoting these pa.s.sages from Chaucer and Barbour will have been antic.i.p.ated. Let me, however, state it in brief. We hear sometimes in these days of a certain science, or rather portion of a more general science, which takes to itself the name of _Social Statics_, and professes, under that name, to have for its business--I give the very phrase of those who define it--the investigation of "possible social simultaneities." That is to say, there may be a science of what can possibly go along with what in any social state or stage; or, to put it otherwise, any one fact or condition of a state of society being given, there may be inferred from that fact or condition some of the other facts and conditions that must necessarily have co-existed with it. Thus at length perhaps, by continued inference, the whole state of an old society might be imaged out, just as Cuvier, from the sight of one bone, could infer with tolerable accuracy the general structure of the animal. Well, will _Social Statics_ be so good as to take the foregoing pa.s.sages, and whirr out of them their "possible social simultaneities"? Were this done, I should be surprised if the England and Scotland of the fourteenth century were to turn out so very unlovely, so atrociously barbarian, after all. These pa.s.sages are actual transmitted bits of the English and Scottish mind of that age, and surely the substance from which they are extracts cannot have been so very coa.r.s.e or bad. Where such sentiments existed and were expressed, where the men that could express them lived and were appreciated, the surrounding medium of thought, of inst.i.tutions, and of customs, must have been to correspond. There must have been truth, and honour, and courtesy, and culture, round those men; there must have been high heart, shrewd sense, delicate art, gentle behaviour, and, in one part of the island at least, a luxuriant complexity of most subtle and exquisite circ.u.mstance.

The conclusion which we have thus reached vindicates that mood of mind towards the whole historical past which we find to have been actually the mood of all the great masters of literature whenever they have ranged back in the past for their themes. When Shakespeare writes of Richard II., who lived two hundred years before his own time, does he not overleap those two hundred years as a mere nothing, plunge in among Richard's Englishmen as intrinsically not different from so many great Elizabethans, make them talk and act as co-equals in whom Elizabethans could take an interest, and even fill the mouth of the weak monarch himself with soliloquies of philosophic melancholy and the kingliest verbal splendours? And so when the same poet goes back into a still remoter antique, as in the council of the Greek chiefs in his _Troilus and Cressida_. We speak of Shakespeare's anachronisms in such cases. There they are certainly for the critic to note; but they only serve to bring out more clearly his main principle in his art--his sense or instinct, for all historic time, of a grand over-matching synchronism. And, indeed, without something of this instinct--this sense of an intrinsic traditional humanity persisting through particular progressive variations, this belief in a co-equality of at least some minds through all the succession of human ages in what we call the historic period--what were the past of mankind to us much more than a history of dogs or ruminants? Nay, and with that measure with which we mete out to others, with the same measure shall it not be meted out to ourselves? If to be dead is to be inferior, and if to be long dead is to be despicable, to the generation in possession, shall not we who are in possession now have pa.s.sed into the state of inferiority to-morrow, with all the other defunct beyond us, and will not a time come when some far future generation will lord it on the earth, and _we_ shall lie deep, deep down, among the strata of the despicable?

THE END.

LONDON; R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.

Footnotes:

[1] _Fraser's Magazine_, Dec. 1844.

[2] _British Quarterly Review_, November, 1852.--1. "Shakspeare and His Times." By M. Guizot. 1852.--2. "Shakspeare's Dramatic Art; and his Relation to Calderon and Goethe." Translated from the German of Dr.

Hermann Ulrici. 1846.--3. "Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret." Translated from the German by John Oxenford. 2 vols. 1850.

[3] According to Mr. Lewes, in his Life of Goethe, it is a mistake to fancy that Goethe was tall. He seemed taller than he really was.

[4] This saying of Steevens, though still repeated in books, has lost its force with the public. The Lives of Shakespeare by Mr. Halliwell and Mr.

Charles Knight, written on such different principles, have effectually dissipated the old impression. Mr. Knight, by his use of the principle of synchronism, and his acc.u.mulation of picturesque details, in his Biography of Shakespeare, has left the public without excuse, if they still believe in Steevens.

[5] _North British Review_, February 1852:--"The Works of John Milton." 8 vols. London: Pickering. 1851.

[6] _British Quarterly Review_, July, 1854. The Annotated Edition of the English Poets: Edited by Robert Bell. "Poetical Works of John Dryden." 3 vols. London. 1854.

[7] _British Quarterly Review_, October 1854.--1. "The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century." A Series of Lectures. By W. M. Thackeray.

London: 1853. 2. "The Life of Swift." By Sir Walter Scott. Edinburgh: 1848.

[8] _Macmillan's Magazine_, July 1871.